In the category of: Meet the neighbors.

Far outside our Milky Way galaxy, something is causing repeating short bursts of radio waves to be released into space. Scientists have recorded the second repeating fast radio burst to be discovered, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The finding was also presented at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

These radio bursts are only millisecond-long radio flashes, and such rapid bursts themselves aren’t rare in space.

But this is only the second one that has been found to repeat. The mystery about why these bursts happen and where they come from continues, which always spurs believers to think that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are creating them.

In the category of: Let the man talk…

To get things done, the president needs to shut up.

You don’t shut down the government over a dispute between a $1.3 billion and a $5.7 billion appropriation — you pass a continuing resolution while you keep talking it over. But Trump has drastically elevated the stakes, over and over again, by shutting down the government, equating the proposal with his wall, and concocting a fake border crisis to which somehow a multi-year construction project is an urgently needed solution.

It’s incredibly stupid, and Republicans like Crenshaw who know better need to talk to Trump about it, not their political enemies. Reopen the government, start tweeting about something else, let congressional appropriators do their boring horse-trading, and they will find some money for some steel slats.

But to get that, Trump needs to be willing to humble himself on the fence-versus-wall semantics and step out of the spotlight. And that doesn’t sound like Trump at all.

In the category of: The Legalization of Racism

The Washington Post reports that the Department of Justice recently issued an internal memo directing top civil rights officials inside the Department of Justice to examine how disparate impact regulations can be changed or removed. Similar efforts are also underway at the Department of Education as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of “disparate impact” (sometimes called “adverse impact,” or (“disproportionate impact”) allow me to explain the concept with another, more appropriate synonym: